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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Confusing and chaotic, Babylon A.D. was said by its director, Mathieu Kassovitz, to have been heavily cut in order to obtain a PG-13 rating. Whether or not that explains why the film feels so thin on story details and heavy on obligatory explosions, is hard to say. What is clear is that the film is mildly enjoyable if one just focuses on the non-stop action. Vin Diesel plays Toorop, a futuristic mercenary living in Eastern Europe and eating unappetizing critters. A gangster named Gorsky (Gerard Depardieu) engages him to transport a girl, Aurora (the spooky-looking Melanie Thierry), and her chaperone, a nun named Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh), from Russia to New York, taking a route over the top of the world. With no idea what's so special about Aurora, Toorop soon encounters some inexplicable facts. First, Aurora has a wild passion for helpless people, including the poor, refugees, etc.--so wild, she has to be contained at times. She also has a strange genius for understanding such things as handling the controls of an old submarine, which she has never been done before.
Stills from Babylon A.D. (Click for larger image)
Over the North Pole and down into America, Toorop is drawn into a battle for possession of Aurora fought in Manhattan's streets. The combatants, it turns out, are more or less Aurora's parents, who have very different reasons for wanting something special she's carrying within her. The complicated story is never truly clear, making it hard to sympathize with a downbeat ending or enjoying a sophisticated support cast including Yeoh, Charlotte Rampling, Depardieu and Lambert Wilson. Diesel is his usual laconic and enjoyable self, and his performance as a hit man who settles somewhat into a makeshift family with Rebeka and Aurora is as touching as his fighting skills are still impressive. --Tom Keogh
Beyond Babylon A.D.
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Stills from Babylon A.D. (Click for larger image)
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Product Description
In the darkly futuristic world of Babylon A.D., the rules are simple: kill or be killed. Hard-hitting action superstar Vin Diesel (The Fast & The Furious, The Chronicles of Riddick), stars as Toorop, a ruthless mercenary hired to smuggle a mysterious young woman from the post-apocalyptic confines of Eastern Europe to the glittering megalopolis of New York City. Hunted at every turn, Toorop spirits his charge across a nightmarish wasteland only to uncover a shocking secret that will bring the entire world to its knees. Eye-popping action and mind-blowing science fiction clash head-on in this hard-edged thriller, where the only rule is survival.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
84 of 93 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't deserve the hatred -- and probably no more than a rental.
January 7, 2009
By Tyler Foster
Format:DVD
Much like The Spirit, a poorly-written, all-over-the-map misinterpretation of Will Eisner's character, complete with entertaining performances and stunning visuals, Babylon A.D. is a confusing, occasionally dry, very familiar mess with some strong performances and stunning visuals in service of a fairly engaging story. It is not, by any means, a great film. It is also not, by any means, a disaster. I noted that Babylon A.D. has one one-star rating on here, and I think the movie deserves better. I saw the film in theaters, and I was reasonably entertained up until the last five minutes. Not even The Spirit completely lived up to that standard.
When films like this come along, I wonder how many people tune out once they've seen a few things they don't like. I am a glass-half-full person. Hundreds of films come out every year, and 90% of them probably have merits that people simply ignore because it's easier to attack the things about them that aren't as sharp. Sure, it borrows from Blade Runner. Movies borrow from other movies. If this was automatically a strike against a film, Quentin Tarantino would have no fans. I personally think Vin Diesel is a fairly charismatic actor (see his recent effort Find Me Guilty for evidence of this), and yet it's like he's got a target on his head. I'm sure some people decided they didn't like this movie just on the basis that he's in it.
The "Unrated and Raw" presentation on DVD does not work miracles on the film. Numerous internet sources claim varying degrees of footage was altered or chopped out of the film, ranging from 15 minutes (since the theatrical cut ran 90m and this runs 103, that's about 15) all the way up to a towering 70m. Admittedly, this ending makes a LOT more sense (which is to say, any sense) than the theatrical ending, although, with apologies to director Mathieu Kassovitz, I liked the hummer chase, presented as a deleted scene on the 2-disc DVD (not to mention in the version without the chase, one set of antagonists just gives up, apparently).
For some reason, it's apparently easy to forget that the scale goes from one to five, and the three stars in the middle are more than padding for the first and last ones. I've seen movies that aren't even always in focus. Certainly a movie can become terrible long before it starts to fail on a technical level, but Babylon A.D. is not one of those movies. It's perfectly OKAY, and that's something that deserves some more credit.
When films like this come along, I wonder how many people tune out once they've seen a few things they don't like. I am a glass-half-full person. Hundreds of films come out every year, and 90% of them probably have merits that people simply ignore because it's easier to attack the things about them that aren't as sharp. Sure, it borrows from Blade Runner. Movies borrow from other movies. If this was automatically a strike against a film, Quentin Tarantino would have no fans. I personally think Vin Diesel is a fairly charismatic actor (see his recent effort Find Me Guilty for evidence of this), and yet it's like he's got a target on his head. I'm sure some people decided they didn't like this movie just on the basis that he's in it.
The "Unrated and Raw" presentation on DVD does not work miracles on the film. Numerous internet sources claim varying degrees of footage was altered or chopped out of the film, ranging from 15 minutes (since the theatrical cut ran 90m and this runs 103, that's about 15) all the way up to a towering 70m. Admittedly, this ending makes a LOT more sense (which is to say, any sense) than the theatrical ending, although, with apologies to director Mathieu Kassovitz, I liked the hummer chase, presented as a deleted scene on the 2-disc DVD (not to mention in the version without the chase, one set of antagonists just gives up, apparently).
For some reason, it's apparently easy to forget that the scale goes from one to five, and the three stars in the middle are more than padding for the first and last ones. I've seen movies that aren't even always in focus. Certainly a movie can become terrible long before it starts to fail on a technical level, but Babylon A.D. is not one of those movies. It's perfectly OKAY, and that's something that deserves some more credit.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Babylon A.D. / B001KMB6YG
*Spoilers*
I'm not really sure what happened here. Vin Diesel does mindless action, and does it well, and here is no exception - whatever flaws "Babylon A.D." has, they are not his fault. Nor are they the fault of Michelle Yeoh who carries herself (as always) superbly, leaving the viewer to wonder why, exactly, Yeoh keeps showing up in particularly flat action movies (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor leaps to mind) when she really is so much better than that and has proven it time and time again. Either there's still some kind of "White Actresses Only" rule barring Yeoh from the better movies, or she has a really terrible agent. Anyway.
Sometimes you can just tell when a movie is based off of a science fiction story you haven't been exposed to. "Babylon A.D." is definitely one of those movies - sure enough, the opening credits note a sci-fi story that may or may not be obscure, but which I definitely haven't read yet. A lot of the standard sci-fi fare is here: much of the world's animals have died out, and have been replaced by clones; America is a closed-borders super-power where a high standard of living is possible for the wealthy, but the rest of the world flounders in deep poverty and warfare; genetic modification of humans is the way to the future. Etc.
Into all this steps Vin Diesel, a conscientious mercenary given a second chance to re-enter America, if only he will deliver a sheltered teenager (and her adoptive mother, Yeoh) along the way. Vin Diesel is only too happy to comply, although he is understandably spooked by the sleepy-eyed girl he's been given charge of. When the girl starts displaying uncanny abilities, such as a near-psychic understanding of the immediate future, an ability to speak multiple languages fluently, and intimate knowledge of the controls of a derelict submarine, he recognizes that there's something a bit off about the young lady and - suspects - that she might be carrying a terrorist-created virus. If so, he vows to murder the girl before she can be 'activated', although this doesn't make much sense because (mind you, I'm not a biologist) it seems like that wouldn't necessarily neutralize the danger.
Anyway, that doesn't matter, because it turns out the girl is *really* a genetically modified human with 'the brain of a computer' and she's been impregnated with twins (apparently during a brief doctor's visit prior to the start of the movie) who are 'powerful' even in the womb, yet in a completely undefined sense. The girl's "mother" - the leader of a cult who commissioned her birth in the hope that this new messiah/madonna would bring in a few more converts - plans to kidnap the girl and...well, it's not exactly clear what she plans to do with her. Use her as a P.R. device, apparently, but it's not clear why Vin Diesel feels compelled to save her from this fate. For that matter, it's exceedingly creepy to see the young lady come on to Vin Diesel, given that he's getting at that age where he could probably be her father and, besides, his entire role in the movie up to her attempted seduction is a paternal one, not a romantic one. It would seem that Hollywood no longer knows how to portray a Man and a Woman without insisting that they "Find Twue Luv".
Despite serious differences in age and genetics, Vin Diesel realizes that he does love the girl and saves her from a non-specific fate that might be bad, but might not be. And then, because the movie was getting a bit longish, we immediately jump to the epilogue where we find that our Computer-Brain Girl was only designed to bear children and nothing more (why? how?) and she has spent the entire pregnancy in a coma (which we all know is just wonderful for fetal development, good grief), and once she delivers (in the quietest delivery ever), she will die and leave the infants in Vin Diesel's capable hands, where he will protect them from...what? Being used for evil, perhaps, although it's unclear how the children could be useful for anything more than the average human baby. This is left out, however, either because they were hoping for a sequel or - more likely - because they ran out of budget.
"Babylon A.D" suffers simultaneously from too much exposition and not enough of it. Huge swaths of dialogue are devoted to heart-to-heart conversations between Vin Diesel and Yeoh while they hash out that the girl is really super special and important - really! - without the viewer ever understanding *why* the girl is useful nor *why* her children are important or powerful or even where they came from. The result is that there is far too little mindless action (because we have to talk about Special! Computer! Girl!) for this to be a proper action flick, and yet far too little pertinent exposition for this to be a proper science fiction film. Since much of the movie feels sloppy and poorly edited, I expect that the whole thing was filmed with a proper amount of action and exposition and then someone with poor editing kung fu took out the relevant dialogue and left in the moody, introspective stuff.
It is possible that familiarity with the source material is just a necessity for proper viewing of this movie, however, I tend to feel that a movie should be able to stand on its own without needing "pre-reading" on the part of the viewer. In that sense, "Babylon A.D." fails, and I don't particularly recommend it as anything more than a mindless adult-protects-precocious-child-through-scifi-explosions movie, and if you want to watch something like that, at least Ultraviolet has vampires. I'm just saying.
*Spoilers*
I'm not really sure what happened here. Vin Diesel does mindless action, and does it well, and here is no exception - whatever flaws "Babylon A.D." has, they are not his fault. Nor are they the fault of Michelle Yeoh who carries herself (as always) superbly, leaving the viewer to wonder why, exactly, Yeoh keeps showing up in particularly flat action movies (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor leaps to mind) when she really is so much better than that and has proven it time and time again. Either there's still some kind of "White Actresses Only" rule barring Yeoh from the better movies, or she has a really terrible agent. Anyway.
Sometimes you can just tell when a movie is based off of a science fiction story you haven't been exposed to. "Babylon A.D." is definitely one of those movies - sure enough, the opening credits note a sci-fi story that may or may not be obscure, but which I definitely haven't read yet. A lot of the standard sci-fi fare is here: much of the world's animals have died out, and have been replaced by clones; America is a closed-borders super-power where a high standard of living is possible for the wealthy, but the rest of the world flounders in deep poverty and warfare; genetic modification of humans is the way to the future. Etc.
Into all this steps Vin Diesel, a conscientious mercenary given a second chance to re-enter America, if only he will deliver a sheltered teenager (and her adoptive mother, Yeoh) along the way. Vin Diesel is only too happy to comply, although he is understandably spooked by the sleepy-eyed girl he's been given charge of. When the girl starts displaying uncanny abilities, such as a near-psychic understanding of the immediate future, an ability to speak multiple languages fluently, and intimate knowledge of the controls of a derelict submarine, he recognizes that there's something a bit off about the young lady and - suspects - that she might be carrying a terrorist-created virus. If so, he vows to murder the girl before she can be 'activated', although this doesn't make much sense because (mind you, I'm not a biologist) it seems like that wouldn't necessarily neutralize the danger.
Anyway, that doesn't matter, because it turns out the girl is *really* a genetically modified human with 'the brain of a computer' and she's been impregnated with twins (apparently during a brief doctor's visit prior to the start of the movie) who are 'powerful' even in the womb, yet in a completely undefined sense. The girl's "mother" - the leader of a cult who commissioned her birth in the hope that this new messiah/madonna would bring in a few more converts - plans to kidnap the girl and...well, it's not exactly clear what she plans to do with her. Use her as a P.R. device, apparently, but it's not clear why Vin Diesel feels compelled to save her from this fate. For that matter, it's exceedingly creepy to see the young lady come on to Vin Diesel, given that he's getting at that age where he could probably be her father and, besides, his entire role in the movie up to her attempted seduction is a paternal one, not a romantic one. It would seem that Hollywood no longer knows how to portray a Man and a Woman without insisting that they "Find Twue Luv".
Despite serious differences in age and genetics, Vin Diesel realizes that he does love the girl and saves her from a non-specific fate that might be bad, but might not be. And then, because the movie was getting a bit longish, we immediately jump to the epilogue where we find that our Computer-Brain Girl was only designed to bear children and nothing more (why? how?) and she has spent the entire pregnancy in a coma (which we all know is just wonderful for fetal development, good grief), and once she delivers (in the quietest delivery ever), she will die and leave the infants in Vin Diesel's capable hands, where he will protect them from...what? Being used for evil, perhaps, although it's unclear how the children could be useful for anything more than the average human baby. This is left out, however, either because they were hoping for a sequel or - more likely - because they ran out of budget.
"Babylon A.D" suffers simultaneously from too much exposition and not enough of it. Huge swaths of dialogue are devoted to heart-to-heart conversations between Vin Diesel and Yeoh while they hash out that the girl is really super special and important - really! - without the viewer ever understanding *why* the girl is useful nor *why* her children are important or powerful or even where they came from. The result is that there is far too little mindless action (because we have to talk about Special! Computer! Girl!) for this to be a proper action flick, and yet far too little pertinent exposition for this to be a proper science fiction film. Since much of the movie feels sloppy and poorly edited, I expect that the whole thing was filmed with a proper amount of action and exposition and then someone with poor editing kung fu took out the relevant dialogue and left in the moody, introspective stuff.
It is possible that familiarity with the source material is just a necessity for proper viewing of this movie, however, I tend to feel that a movie should be able to stand on its own without needing "pre-reading" on the part of the viewer. In that sense, "Babylon A.D." fails, and I don't particularly recommend it as anything more than a mindless adult-protects-precocious-child-through-scifi-explosions movie, and if you want to watch something like that, at least Ultraviolet has vampires. I'm just saying.
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
INTRIGUING STUNNER...... bad editing. ***UK extended edition available
January 11, 2009
By M. Western
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
I rarely go into Vin Diesel movies with high expectations given his limited range. Let's face it, when you build a certain physique and persona you have to accept being pigeon holed a little as an actor. I read other reviews before watching this and removed it from my pre-order list in lieu for a rental. What a surprise to the upside. Some of the critique for this movie is warranted and the ending as you find it in the US edition will leave questions. The most important attitude to see this movie with is to enjoy the process and not look for simple gratification in the ending. As a near futuristic movie, this film tackles the challenge of envisioning a near future with new technology that is, if not realistic, still far from the utterly ridiculous that many movies try to present. THIS IS NOT JUST A DUMBED DOWN ACTION SPECTACLE. One might be surprised to see Vin in what is actually a very ambitious, intelligent movie for this genre. Though any one part of the plot by itself may not be original, I found the sum total to be refreshingly different. There are also spectacular visuals, very well orchestrated action scenes, thought provoking issues and conflicts and very wonderful performances by many actors. Pay attention to the technologies and gadgets here and there. A little satire on religion and the questions of real faith and spirituality were also great. This is a really good movie that just couldn't do everything it wanted in the time allowed. Don't get me wrong, if I were rating the editing of this movie, it would be two stars. I have no doubt that it was butchered by idiots who had no faith in an original vision. I wish they would take the footage and re-edit the US version. I wouldn't normally find myself looking forward to a 2 1/2 hour Vin Diesel movie, but I would really like to see what they can do with this one.
***Update: Amazon UK has a slightly longer version that fills in a few holes. Know that you like the movie before you spend the cash. However, they will deliver to US addresses relatively cheap. You may need a region two player or simply change the region on your laptop. Some blu are region free, I beleive the UK version is not.
***Update: Amazon UK has a slightly longer version that fills in a few holes. Know that you like the movie before you spend the cash. However, they will deliver to US addresses relatively cheap. You may need a region two player or simply change the region on your laptop. Some blu are region free, I beleive the UK version is not.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vin Diesel does it...
Vin Diesel needs to take acting lessions. Always the same. Good story. And, yes, good acting. But there was that something missing. Maybe it was the ending?
Published 10 days ago by DONALD BAILEY
1.0 out of 5 stars
I'm upset with Amazon on this one.
I rented this movie for a 24 hour period and it never loaded. When I went back to watch it- Ususally you have 28 days, it was gone.
Published 20 days ago by Tiffany Kozak
5.0 out of 5 stars
Breath taking
I loss interest in a lot of movies but this on kept my interest. The filming of this film was great.
Published 1 month ago by Carolyn Cawley
3.0 out of 5 stars
If you're bored
Like others have said, it's not his best, but it's not terrible. It's sort of a classic dystopian future movie that has spurts of action with a lot of unanswered questions.
Published 1 month ago by Peeps
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent!
Babylon A.D. is a great movie if you like action, gun fights and a little bit of love. If you like every other Vin diesel movie you will definitely like this one as well!
Published 2 months ago by tasha
5.0 out of 5 stars
Action and good plot
I have watched this movie at least 10 times, and i have loved it everytime. It's one of those rare movies that you really don't belive you like until your watching it a third,... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Charles A. Pinkney
1.0 out of 5 stars
BAD Copy of Movie!!
The movie I received from this seller was just a bad, cheap homemade copy. It was actually missing large portions of the movie-and I've seen this movie a few times before deciding... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Manic B
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good movie
I've always enjoyed Vin Diesel, so I enjoyed this movie. It's definitely different, so if you don't enjoy sci-fi, don't buy this movie. It's definitely action-packed.
Published 4 months ago by M. Aldrich
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good movie!
Enjoyed this movie very much. The story was interesting and held my attention. If you're a Van Diesel fan or not, I'm sure you will get into to it and watch it to the end. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Lysan
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pleasantly surprised
I love this movie. If you watch this movie as an action-adventure movie, you will be disappointed. However, if you watch it as a science-fiction movie with religious overtones,... Read more
Published 5 months ago by by Me
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